Chapter Sixteen
Piers spent two days going through boxes for a thing he could not name.
He began one morning with the deed box and the three files of correspondence, worked through them from the back of the drawer forwards, and found nothing.
The estate papers took the afternoon. He read his father's private book twice, once forwards and once from the back, and there was nothing in it about the river.
The next day he had the boxes brought up out of the muniment room, which nobody had opened since the funeral, and sat down on the gallery floor among four generations of paper with a candle at his elbow until the light went.
There were leases in there, presentations to the living, and a dispute about a footpath from his great-grandfather's time that had run to sixty pages and had been settled by everybody dying.
There was a bundle of his grandmother's bills for the glasshouse, tied with tape and endorsed in her own hand, and there was a letter from a Chaloner at Corunna that nobody had opened since it came.
Two hundred years of the family keeping everything but reading none of it.
The riverside strip appeared nine times, and each one of them was harmless.
By that evening he had arrived at the only two possibilities. Either Ellis Pike had said something that meant nothing, in order to watch a man spend two days on the floor of his own gallery, or there was a paper about that ground which had never been in this house.
He got up off the floor and put every box back where it had come from. Mrs Tregarth found him doing it and sent a girl up with a candle and a cloth without being asked.
He wrote to Trescott and Rudge in Salisbury the following morning and asked them to search the registry for anything charged against the riverside land at Ferrers. He gave no reason, and asked for the answer to come to him and not to the estate office.
Then he went and told Sowerby that a search had been commissioned. He did not tell him what he was afraid of, and Sowerby looked at him for slightly too long and said that he would be glad to see the result.
The cloak came from Devizes that week.
He had ordered it in the second week of February, after the glazing, when she had come in from the garden with her hands blue and her sleeves wet through and had said that she was not cold.
Tolley had it up to the house himself. It was dark green wool with a hood, and it had cost eleven guineas out of the ninety. Piers had told Tolley to say nothing about the price to anybody, and Tolley had inclined his head.
He had gone out one morning and again the next and had done nothing useful on either day.
Twice he had ridden past the riverside strip and looked at it.
It was eleven acres of poor grazing with a hazel hedge on the roadside and a bend in the river at the bottom, worth very little to anybody, and there was no reason in the world for any man to want it.
Cecily found him in the study late in the afternoon.
She had the cloak over her arm. She put it over the back of the split chair, and her hand stayed on the wool a moment before she took it away, but she did not sit down.
"My cloak is serviceable," she said.
"It is thin."
"So is yours."
Piers went still where he stood. He had been expecting this conversation since the second week of February but had ordered the thing anyway.
"Mine is a coat," he said.
"Yours is a coat that has been turned and patched twice."
"It wears well."
"Tolley has asked you to replace it for four autumns. I have it from him this afternoon that he asked again in October, and you said again that you are not frugal."
That reached him where nothing else in the conversation had, and it was not the accusation that did it. She had gone and got the fact from Tolley. She had thought about it before she came into the room and had come in with the thing already established.
"I assure you I am," he said.
"No," Cecily said. "You are selective."
He did not answer that.
"You spend when Kitty needs a thing," she went on. "You spend when a cottage leaks."
"Those are necessary."
"You let a man from Devizes have four days on the range door because two girls had burnt their arms, and you never once asked whether it could wait." She looked at the cloak on the chair. "You spend on me."
"That is different," Piers said.
"But when the expense is yours, deprivation becomes good character."
Piers turned towards the fire. It had gone down, as it always did in that room, because the room was thirty feet long and the grate was small, but he had never once in two years told anybody to make it up in the afternoon.
"That is enough," he said.
"No," Cecily said quietly, to his back.
He looked round at her. There had been perhaps four occasions since October when she had said something to him that he could not deal with by being courteous, and this was the fourth, and he was not going to get out of the room.
"You believe a husband provides," she said.
"Yes, I do," he said, with one hand on the mantelpiece.
"And because I brought the money into this marriage, you have taken it that you failed before it began."
"You do not understand."
"Then explain it," she said evenly.
He did not, at first. He picked up the fire iron, looked at it, and put it down again without having used it.
The room was cold, the candles were low, and everything in it was ordinary. He put coal on the fire, the first useful thing his hands had done all day, and stood with his back to her while it caught. She let him have the silence.
Then he sat down in the split chair.
"In June, when I was twenty-six," he said, "my father sent for me to come up to London. I had been at Ferrers all that spring about the drainage."
"Go on." She had not moved from where she was standing.
"There was a solicitor with him. A man called Yeoland, who is dead now. And a schedule on the table with the Bramshaw side on it, the river, Chalke Coombe and the four at Netherton."
Cecily sat down on the other chair.
"I read it," Piers said. "All of it, standing up, while the two of them talked about somebody's horse. It did not take long, and at the end of it I understood what it was."
The fire had taken and was the only sound in the room.
He could see the whole of it while he spoke, which he had not expected.
There was a table with a green cloth on it, and Yeoland had dirty cuffs, and the light through a London window in June at four in the afternoon is a particular colour that he had not thought about in years.
"It was a security over the land that carries four hundred and eleven rents."
"Not the house?" she asked.
"The land only. Every tenancy on that side of the estate, put behind a sum my father had already spent."
"What did you say?"
Piers kept his eyes on the fire. "Not a word. I did not put a question. I did not ask to see the schedule again."
Cecily kept still and made none of the small sounds that people make in order to be encouraging.
"I stood beside him when he signed it. Yeoland witnessed it, and my father made a remark about the weather, and I said that it had been a wet spring in Wiltshire." He put his hands together. "Then we dined."
"You were twenty-six," she said.
"I was twenty-six, I could read a schedule, and I had walked that ground since I was seven." He looked at his own hands. "I could have said a single sentence."
"Why did you not?"
"Because he was my father," he said at last, "and there was another man in the room, and to contradict the Duke of Havering in front of his own solicitor would have been a discourtesy."
The word came out level.
"I was polite," Piers added.
Cecily let that stand.
"That is the whole of it," he said.
"It is not that he gambled," she said slowly.
"He did that for nine years, and I could not have stopped one of them." He was looking at the fire and not at her. "It is that I was in the room on the one day when a word from me might have gone somewhere. And I stood beside him and behaved well."
He had not said any of it aloud before, to anyone. It came out slower than he would have liked and in the wrong order in two places, but he left both of them where they fell.
"Have you said this to anybody?" she asked.
"No. Nor to my sister, nor to Blythe, nor to anybody in Wiltshire."
"Not to Sowerby?"
"Sowerby was not there. Sowerby thinks it all happened to me." Piers moved the fire iron six inches and put it back. "That is what everybody thinks, and I have let them."
It was late by then, and neither of them had thought about the hour. Somewhere above them a door closed, which would be Kitty, who never went to bed when she was told.
Piers had expected, in so far as he had expected anything, that having said it he would want the room to himself. Instead, he sat wanting very much for her not to go, with no way of saying so.
"You have mistaken punishment for duty," Cecily said.
"No," he said, and his hand found the edge of the cloak behind his shoulder and held it.
"You have. You call it provision because provision is respectable."
"It is not a word I chose for its respectability. It is provision," he said. "It is the only part of this that I am any use at."
"Then let me finish." She had her hands in her lap, and she was not comfortable. "You may provide for everybody. Your sister. Every household on the Bramshaw side. Mrs Halloran and Wickens and a keeper's widow at Bramshaw who has no claim on you at all… And me."
"That is my responsibility, and I have never once complained of it."
"But nobody may provide for you?"
"That is not the same thing."
"It is the same thing," Cecily said without heat, "when you make receiving an insult."
Piers did not answer her.
He had four or five things available, and each one of them was a version of the same sentence. She did not understand what it was to be handed your own house by somebody with no reason on earth to do it.
He said none of them. She had paid forty thousand pounds and would have been entirely within her rights to throw the fire irons at him.
"I do not know how to do it," he said.
"That is fair," Cecily said. "I have been watching you not do it since October. A duty that is only permitted to travel in one direction is not a partnership," she said. "It is a debt with better manners."
The word sat in the middle of the room where she had put it. Piers turned it over twice without picking it up, and she did not offer it again. Near midnight she stood, said only good night, and went out, but left the cloak over the back of his chair.
He sat in a room that was going cold again, with the green cloak on the back of the chair behind his shoulder.